And in 1968, Ron Weiser, who would become one of the most prominent money men in Republican politics, needed cash.

The University of Michigan law school student, two years after earning his business degree there and working as a resident manager of an apartment building at 815-819 S. Main St. downtown, had the chance to buy a small 15-unit property in Ann Arbor for $245,000.

So he did what most in their early 20s would do: He hit up his "bros."

"I didn't have the money," he said. Words you likely will never hear him say again.

After successfully scraping together the $45,000 down payment — today, about $314,000 — from fraternity brothers and others, that apartment building, long since sold, was Weiser's first step to a vast, and undisclosed, fortune accumulated largely in real estate.

And, years later, a place among the GOP's stable of fundraising elite that can be traced to his first apartment purchase.

He deals in hundreds of millions of dollars now, as one of six vice chairmen of a national committee aiming for a far more ambitious goal: $1 billion for Donald Trump's presidential campaign that is expected to kick into high gear this week with a formal GOP nomination at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

He sits in a small, almost claustrophobic temporary office on the fourth floor of the McKinley Corporate Center, the headquarters of the Ann Arbor-based real estate company he founded, McKinley Associates Inc., a few blocks west of the U-M campus. The company, of which Weiser is a majority owner, today has $500 million in annual revenue and a 55 million-square-foot-plus real estate portfolio valued at $4.6 billion in 33 states. Albert Berriz oversees it as its CEO and co-managing member.

Talking last week about his 1968 purchase of the nondescript three-story apartment building overlooking the Huron River and municipal parks, Weiser is casually dressed in a striped button-up short-sleeve shirt.

He is late to an interview, having gotten waylaid by a discussion about the 2016 election with Berriz — who himself has donated more than $100,000 to Republican candidates and causes since 1999, according to Federal Election Commission data — and Doug Rothwell, president and CEO of Business Leaders for Michigan, the state's business roundtable.

On his desk, a tin of breath fresheners: "Disappoint-MINTS," with a photo of President Obama on the lid, stylized a la the outgoing commander-in-chief's "Hope" poster designed by Shepard Fairey during the 2008 presidential election cycle.

Only the next 3 ½ months will tell if the disappointment referenced on the mint tin will translate into a Nov. 8 victory for Trump.

A good GOP foot soldier

Weiser seems uneasy.

He doesn't talk much about his party's presumptive nominee, the flame-throwing Republican who has rankled some in the GOP establishment, not to mention Democrats, with braggadocio and a penchant for racial, religious and gender divisiveness.

"Have I met with him? Yeah, I met with him privately. Have I given him my opinion? Yeah, I have," says Weiser, who turned 71 on July 7.

"He is very bright and he listens to people."

Weiser, a former U.S. ambassador to the Slovak Republic under President George W. Bush, is far from being a full-throated Trump booster.

"He wasn't my first choice in the primary," said Weiser, who stayed out of the primary race.

But Weiser is a good party foot soldier, calling it a "binary choice" between Trump and Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic Party nominee.

Party, not necessarily candidate, comes first.

"Trump doesn't fit the Ronald mold," said John Truscott, who has known Weiser for more than a quarter century, dating back to his time as director of communications and press secretary for former Gov. John Engler.

The Trump Victory Fund, a joint fundraising effort between the Republican National Committee, the Trump campaign and 11 state Republican parties, works like this:

The agreement hashed out in May between the Trump campaign and the RNC establishes two committees: Trump Victory and Trump Make America Great Again. The first raises money for the Trump campaign, the RNC and the Republican parties for 11 states; the latter raises money for the Trump campaign and the RNC.

The maximum donation is $449,400, but only a small portion of that — increments of $2,700 — can legally go to the Trump campaign.

Earlier this month, the campaign said it had raised more than $51 million in June: $6.6 million for Trump Make America Great Again; more than $25 million for Trump Victory; and $19.9 million for Donald J. Trump For President.

"Ron's a committed Republican, and he is going to support the ultimate candidate, regardless of how he feels personally about it," said Bobby Schostak, who succeeded Weiser as the chairman of the Michigan Republican Party and is now co-COO of Livonia-based Schostak Bros. & Co., CEO of Birmingham-based software company The Resolute, and founder and CEO of Birmingham-based consulting firm Templar Baker Group.

A committed Republican, and a relentless one.

"Ron is not afraid to call anybody," said Truscott, who is president of Lansing-based Truscott Rossman, a bipartisan strategic communications firm.

"He is exactly the type of guy you want. He is relentless. He will call anybody and ask for outrageous amounts. … I remember breathing a sigh of relief once when I thought he was calling to ask me for money I knew I couldn't afford to give," Truscott said with a laugh.

FEC records show that Weiser has contributed well over $1 million to a variety of mostly Republican political committees over the years.

Politics is not the only thing Weiser writes big checks to.

He and his wife, Eileen Lappin Weiser, a member of the Michigan Board of Education, have given nearly $100 million to UM.

In December 2014, they gave $50 million, including an additional $25 million for the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies, which along with the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia was established in 2008 with a $10 million donation.

The other half of the $50 million donation went to the University Musical Society (Lappin Weiser is a UM alumna with a graduate degree in piano performance); the Stephen M. Ross School of Business; the School of Education; the University of Michigan Health System's Food Allergy Center; and facilities for student-athletes (Weiser was a UM wrestler while a student).

Fundraising sway

Competing on the fundraising stage with Weiser, who is running again this year for a spot on the UM board of regents after running and losing in 2014, is a challenge, prominent state Democrats say.

Precious few Michigan Democrats have the same fundraising sway — or pockets as deep as Weiser's.

A notable exception is Jon Stryker, the billionaire Kalamazoo heir to the Stryker Corp. fortune. An architect by training, he has donated well over $10 million of his fortune to a variety of Democratic causes and candidates (including more than $200,000 to Clinton in the waning months of 2015), according to FEC records.

"We are in very different worlds," said Mark Brewer, the former longtime chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party. "They are very, very different from what goes on on the Democratic side."

Brewer, now an attorney with the Southfield-based law firm Goodman Acker PC after serving as chairman or executive director of the Michigan Democratic Party from 1995 to 2013, was Weiser's counterpart.

Weiser was Michigan Republican Party chairman from 2009 to 2011.

Brandon Dillon, the Michigan Democratic Party's chairman who succeeded Lon Johnson in January, said Weiser's fortune and willingness to part with large parts of it for political causes are things that Democrats "just don't have."

"He has access to a lot of money and is looking to support candidates who will pursue his agenda," he said.

Entering politics

Weiser said his entry into politics can be traced to the battle in the early 1970s in Ann Arbor over rent control, an issue he fought tooth and nail as a landlord.

"It was pretty tough because most people lived in apartments, and they wanted rent control," he said. "We had to convince them and homeowners that it wouldn't be in their best interest."

He said he and others convinced the public that rent control would ultimately lower the value of multifamily real estate in Ann Arbor, thereby lowering property tax revenue to the city and shifting more taxes onto homeowners.

Even earlier, he remembers the Battle of Ann Arbor in 1969, when he says he watched from atop the roof of a laundromat next to a garage he rented as McKinley's first office space as Washtenaw County sheriff's deputies "come down with their clubs and batons and helmets and shields" during police confrontations with protesters on South University.

But it was nearly 20 years later, when John Engler was Senate majority leader in the Michigan Legislature, that elected politics entered his realm.

The late Heinz Prechter, who founded American Sunroof Corp., urged Andrea Fischer Newman to bring Engler to see Weiser. Fischer Newman, now senior vice president of government affairs for Delta Air Lines and a UM regent, was finance chair for Engler's first gubernatorial campaign in 1989-90.

"I helped him raise his money," Weiser said. "Not very much, though. I didn't know what I was doing back then."

Engler served three terms.

Cold-calling McCain

Among other Republican leadership roles, Weiser went on to be national co-chairman of John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign. He first got to know the Arizona senator when others rebuffed him.

Weiser, as ambassador to the Slovak Republic, had wanted a top Bush administration security official to visit the country to implore its citizens not to "return to authoritarian rule" with their votes during their 2002 election.

But in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the security apparatus for the federal government was staying put in Washington, D.C., Weiser said.

"So we decided that the next best thing would be bringing in a senator," he said.

Enter McCain, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

"I did a cold call on him, told him what the situation was and asked if he'd come during the August recess and back me up, and he came. I owed him, but I also saw somebody who really cared about his country because he changed his plans to come to Slovakia in August, right?"

McCain "turned the tide" against Vladimír Meciar, Slovakia's former prime minister who was once accused of having its secret service abduct a political rival's son. He had been expected to win his old post back.

And Weiser said he and the White House did not want that to happen.

Such an election would throw into jeopardy efforts by Slovakia, which was strategically important after 9/11, to become a member of NATO and the European Union.

"Slovakia was actually a route for the terrorists right out of the Middle East," Weiser said. "They would come right through from Turkey into Ukraine, from Ukraine into Slovakia, up into Poland, and into Germany into western Europe. That's how we caught a lot of them."

The relationship between Weiser and McCain was born.

The future

Weiser took himself out of the day-to-day operations of McKinley in 2001 when he became ambassador, turning the reins over to Berriz.

These days, he has little direct involvement in real estate (other than the $10 million to $12 million redevelopment of the Chelsea Clocktower property in downtown Chelsea).

His first apartment building, at 1028 Fuller St. in Ann Arbor, was sold long ago and is now owned by a Grand Blanc psychiatrist, Dong Ho Yoo.

And he is a far cry from the $60-per-month garage he rented on Church Street and spent $1,000 renovating into an office for McKinley — there was already a real estate company invoking Abraham Lincoln operating in Ann Arbor, so he couldn't name his after the nation's 16th president and he wanted one that would be easy to remember, he said — in the early days to operate it.

"I might at some point focus less on the political stuff and more on the work I do for others," including the Food Allergy Center and helping the Carr family's ChadTough Foundation.

"Doing another full-time political position is not in my future," he said.